us in rapid succession in a cheap gallery: a footrace, the towering pipes of an organ, a diagram with labeled angles, a woman riding in a cart.
Someone said, 'Are you all right? What's happened to you?' I felt the spittle dribbling from my lips, but no words came.
XXX
The Corridors of Time
Something struck my face a tingling blow.
'What's happened? He's dead. Are you drugged?'
'Yes. Drugged.' Someone else was speaking, and after a moment I knew who it was: Severian, the young torturer.
But who was I?
'Get up. We've got to get out.'
'Sentry.'
'Sentries,' the voice corrected us. 'There were three of them. We killed them.'
I was walking down a stair white as salt, down to nenuphars and stagnant water.
Beside me walked a suntanned girl with long and slanting eyes. Over her shoulder peered the sculptured face of one of the eponyms. The carver had worked in jade; the effect was that of a face of grass.
'Is he dying?'
'He sees us now. See his eyes.'
I knew where I was. Soon the pitchman would thrust his head through the doorway of the tent to tell me to be gone. 'Above ground,' I said. 'You told me I would see her above ground. But that was easy. She is here.'
'We must go.' The green man took my left arm and Agia my right, and they led me out.
We walked a long way, just as I had envisioned myself running, stepping sometimes over sleeping Ascians.
'They keep little guard,' Agia whispered. 'Vodalus told me their leaders are so well obeyed they can scarcely conceive of treacherous attack, In the war, our soldiers surprise them often.'
I did not understand and repeated, ' 'Our soldiers ' ' like a child.
'Hethor and I will no longer fight for them. How could we, after we have seen them? My business is with you.'
I was beginning to find myself again, the minds that made up my mind all falling into place. I had been told once that autarch meant 'self-ruler,' and I glimpsed the reason that title had come into being. I said, 'You wanted to kill me. Now you are freeing me. You could have stabbed me.' I saw a crooked dagger from Thrax quivering in Casdoe's shutter.
'I could have killed you more readily than that. Hethor's mirrors have given me a worm, no longer than your hand, that glows with white fire. I have only to fling it, and it kills and crawls back to me one by one I slew the sentries so.
But this green man would not permit it, and I would not wish it. Vodalus promised me your agony spread over weeks, and I will not have less.'
'You're taking me back to him?'
She shook her head, and in the faint, gray dawn light that had crept through the leaves I saw her brown curls bounce on her shoulders as they had when I had watched her raise the gratings outside the rag shop. 'Vodalus is dead. With the worm at my command, do you think I would let him cheat me and live? They would have taken you away. Now I will let you go free because I have some inkling of where you will go and in the end you will come into my hands again, as you did when our pteriopes took you from the evzones.'
'You are rescuing me because you hate me then,' I said, and she nodded. Vodalus, I suppose, had hated that part of me that had been the Autarch in the same way.
Or rather, he had hated his conception of the Autarch, for he had been loyal, in so far as he was capable of it, to the real Autarch, whom he supposed his servant. When I had been a boy in the kitchens of the House Absolute, there was a cook who so despised the armigers and exultants for whom he prepared food that, in order that he should never have to bear the indignity of their reproaches, he did everything with a feverish perfection. He was eventually made chief of the cooks of that wing. I thought of him, and while I did, Agia's touch on my arm, which had become almost imperceptible as we hastened along, vanished altogether. When I looked for her, she was gone; I was alone with the green man.
'How did you come to be here?' I asked him. 'You nearly lost your life in these times, and I know you cannot thrive under our sun.'
He smiled. Though his lips were green, his teeth were white; they gleamed in the faint light. 'We are your children, and we are not less honest than you, though we do not kill to eat. You gave me half your stone, the stone that gnawed the iron and set me free. What did you think I would do when the chain no longer bound me?'
'I supposed you would return to your own day,' I said. The spell of the drug had faded sufficiently for me to fear our talk would wake the Ascian soldiers. Yet I could see none-only the dark, towering boles of the jungle hardwoods.
'We requite our benefactors. I have been running up and down the corridors of Time, seeking for a moment in which you also were imprisoned, that I might free you.'
When I heard that, I did not know what to say. At last I told him, 'You cannot imagine how strange I feel now, knowing that someone has been searching my future, looking for an opportunity to do me good. But now, now that we are quits, surely you understand that I did not help you because I believed you could help me.'
'You did you desired my help in finding the woman who just left us, the woman whom since that occasion you have found several times. However, you ought to know that I was not alone: There are others questing there I shall
